as a psychology major, I am required to write everything in an "active voice" and avoid the "passive voice". This is something I have had a great deal of difficulty with on occsaision, as there are often phrases that seem to flow better in the passive voice than the active. In addition, I had some confusion as to what constitutes passive voice vs active voice. according to the writing center at the University of South Carolina Chapel Hill, "A passive construction occurs when you make the object of an action into the subject of a sentence. That is, whoever or whatever is performing the action is not the grammatical subject of the sentence. Take a look at this passive rephrasing of a familiar joke:Why was the road crossed by the chicken? "
This is an obvious example of the passive voice, but there are a number of less obvious ways to fall into using the passive voice, especially when writing about scientific research. Here is an example from one of my own papers.
"The research was conducted in a classroom setting"
this sentence does not seem to be stylistically "bad", but under APA style guidelines, this sewntence had to be changed to
"We conducted the research in a classroom study"
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